I love a good solitaire game. While I am sympathetic to Raf’s excellent take on games-about-people-with-people COIN series for me there’s a certain pleasure to sitting at my dining room table late at night, with the fire going nearby and the sound of one of my dogs snoring nearby, and just spending some time doing something I enjoy, making little explosion noises and moving tiny plastic army men — or in this case cardboard counters — around.

Enter NATO Air Commander.

Designed by Brad Smith and published by Hollandspiele, a delightful small-press indie wargame company, it is set in the well-trod quasi-historical “Cold War goes hot” setting, with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe in May of 1987 under one of several pretenses based on the scenario.

It’s a strategic level game, with the player coordinating the air war over the entire Western European theater, and takes a sort of interesting approach — the war is happening to you, and you can’t really do anything about it. Instead, you’re trying to throw the weight of NATO’s air power where it’s needed to influence outcomes while balancing pressure from various commanders that are not necessarily aligned with what you think should be happening.

But how does it play?

The Elephant in the Room

When I bought NATO Air Commander in 2022, my thought was “This hits a little different than when it was published in 2018.”

I’ll be blunt, it hits a little different in 2025 than it did in 2022.

I found myself apologizing to the Canadian fighter unit a lot.

Map and Counter Quality

The games I have from Hollandspiele come in relatively compact, shelf-friendly 8.5×11″ boxes. This does somewhat limit what can come in the box, and if you’re looking for a massive map, this isn’t the right game for you.

The map itself is 22×17″, and while well-laid out and attractive, probably the weakest point of the game in terms of material quality, as the fairly thin paper was not interested in laying flat, despite some concerted effort on my part. This was a relatively minor annoyance, and didn’t really impact things, but it’s there.

Alongside the map is a fairly plain but well laid-out 12-page rulebook that goes through everything you need to play and has a handy quick-reference on the back, and a hefty pack of 50 cards that are the primary randomization engine for the game. We’ll come back to these later when we talk about gameplay.

Finally, you have 96 counters, consisting of counters for very abstract representations of NATO and Warsaw Pact ground forces, some potential buffs for your units like skilled pilots and precision guided munitions, and administrative tokens for things like turn counting, victory point tracking, and whether or not particular types of air strikes can be called. Hollandspiele uses thick MDF counters, which deprives me of the use of my corner clippers (IYKYK), but they’re pleasingly durable and setting down a stack of them on a target does give me the pleasing feeling of “Oh, now you’re in for it…” that I’m looking for. The insane part of me wants to paint the sides of the counters black.

General Gameplay

Setup

The initial setup has the Warsaw Pact attacking along six tracks – Alpha through Foxtrot – opposed by NATO troops that are at varying states of readiness depending on the difficulty of the scenario you chose. The way the mechanics are set up essentially ensures that, without intervention, NATO will lose.

Fortunately, NATO has you. Fail to turn the tide and your career, along with the world, will end in the deployment of nuclear weapons.

The core of the game is allocating your available air units to various air raids that have the potential to turn the tide, while managing resources to repair damaged aircraft, purchase precision munitions, etc.

Raids

Each raid has a primary mission – the planes doing the actual bombing – along with an air escort and SEAD (“Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses”) to keep the Soviet air force and various anti-aircraft assets at bay respectively. Fail to allocate enough power to these, and the strike ends before it begins, or at best your units come back damaged and in need of repair before deployment again. The balance of wanting to do a lot of things, and making sure you get through, is a tricky one, and several times during the game a critical “sure thing” that I didn’t allocate quite enough to bit me. We lost Stuttgart for a time because of it. You can only assign five units per raid, so sometimes failure isn’t avoidable, but for the most part, its your available units being stretched too thin that’s the problem.

Aircraft have three stats, Air, Ground and Strike, which represents a unit’s ability to perform air-to-air combat, bombing missions, and specialist precision missions respectively. The two buffs available to those units are pilots, which allow a re-draw of a card (see below) and precision guided munitions, which double the respective stats of a unit. These are especially important, as they’re the only way to make raids a “sure thing”.

There are several available “types” of raids. The bread-and-butter of the game are CAS (“Combat Air Support”) raids. If your raid manages to evade enemy fighters, for each five points worth of ground attack they have, they score a “hit” (An A-10 has a skill of 7, so they’re an auto-hit, while the addition of a skill 3 F-111 would push the raid over to two hits). This, in turn, adds that many points to the end phase where you check if the Warsaw Pact has managed to push back the NATO front line. Enough CAS hits, and you can turn the tide in favor of a battered force that otherwise wouldn’t stand a chance.

OCA (“Offensive Counter-Air”) and DEAD (“Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses”) raids degrade the Soviet ability to repel and damage your raids, which in turn means you can devote fewer resources to air escort and SEAD duties, and stretch how many raids you’re able to do. These do require a degree of “tending” – on average the Warsaw Pact will recover one point every two turns, so either you have to continually hit them, or devote a lot of resources to knocking them out every once in awhile. Once these start to dip, they incur penalties to the values of cards drawn to see how well the Warsaw Pact responds to your air raids.

Finally, there are two special missions that only work if you’ve had a successful round of reconnaissance missions (basically a pre-turn round where you draw a card with a 0-10 value, hoping it’s a 5 or less, including any penalty you’ve managed to get on the OCA track (representing not being able to shoot down your spy planes). “Decapitation Strikes” are attacking enemy HQ units, and let you remove cards from the deck or get into other shenanigans, while FOFA “Follow-on Forces Attacks” will reduce Warsaw Pact reinforcements, meaning any gains you made with your CAS raids might, in an area or two, persist for more than just a turn and buy you a little breathing room.

Randomization

One of the keys to all wargames, but especially to solitare wargames, is a good randomization system. In this case, it’s largely card based, with objectives and everything else being different decks. It’s a solid system – one of the big pushes in the game is, in essence, to reduce how dependent you are on good luck.

It’s a decent system, but it involves going through a lot of cards in a given turn. Alongside that are a couple cards that make you shuffle, and between the two, you end up shuffling to provided card deck with a fair degree of frequency. I found myself wishing I had a shuffler, because I am, to be frank, bad at shuffling.

Between that and the variable missions one can get, it’s hard to feel really secure that your plans will definitely work, especially early game, unless you are very heavily over-investing in escorts.

Which brings us to the “feel” of the game…

Game “Feel”

Most “Cold War Goes Hot” games have a certain cadence to them – a surging Soviet invasion combined with a desperate NATO defense, which either collapses (losing the game) or stabilizes as NATO air superiority, American reinforcements, etc. arrive to stabilize the front.

Or someone gets desperate, fires a nuke, and everyone dies.

NATO Air Commander follows a roughly similar cadence. Things are desperate at first, Warsaw Pact fighters and air defenses capable of mounting substantial resistance, your forces not yet having been fully activated, etc. You’ve got things happening everywhere but you have to concentrate your raids on where things are the worst, or if not that, where there’s some chance your influence will help.

Toward the end of the game, things stabilize, your strikes are more effective and can be spread out, etc. That is, if you’re winning. I was worried this would make the final few turns of the game tedious, but they turned out not to be, as even as effective as my now undisputed airpower was, I had a lot of ground to make up from earlier losses, so fighting the Warsaw Pact back to the starting line (which was my personal goal for the easy scenario) still took a fair amount of thought and planning.

If you’re losing of course, the last few turns are a desperate last ditch effort.

Core Gameplay Dynamics

While the core of the game meets that “Yep, it’s a Cold War Goes Hot game…” feeling, there are some subtle dynamics to how the game plays that I think warrant calling out specifically as highlights of the games I’ve played thus far: The roles of each country and the presence of some critical thresholds that will change a lot of your core assumptions and capabilities within the game, along with some tough decisions about cards.

Country Roles

At first, I felt like the individual squadrons were largely fungible, but as I played a game, several “roles” became clear.

The United States, obviously, has All The Things, and is the closest to a stand-alone force within the game. But even there, they have a notably strong force of precision bombers (including an F-117 squadron), and as such excel at the special types of raids that, while not directly achieving objectives, will degrade the Warsaw Pact’s ability to fight back.

Great Britain is the other “backbone” force – slightly weaker than the U.S., but with solid bombers and fighters, and critically access to ace pilots, who are a source of valuable card redraws. RAF fighters and bombers get things done.

Germany plays a very interesting role. While they’re just objectively less strong on a squadron-by-squadron basis, German planes make very efficient “force multipliers”, by being pretty good at a bunch of things, instead of being strong specialists. German F-4 Phantoms pushed a number of air raids over a critical success threshold (a A-10 with precision guided munitions will give you two successes, adding an F-4 gets you to three, for example, during a raid). And importantly, they could do it for both in both ground attack and air superiority roles. Alongside having one pilot for a card redraw, they’re good at making things that should be borderline tip over into solved.

Canada and the Netherlands have the smallest absolute contribution, but the planes they bring are solid. Most importantly, Canada has the 2nd best air superiority fighters in the form of one of their F-16 squadrons, and I found myself often thinking “Canada can handle this solo”.

Card Tradeoffs

NATO Air Commander absolutely packs information into their cards, but you’re likely only going to use one number on them – though which number varies. One of the special types of raids, Decapitation Strike, lets you remove cards from the deck, but this is often less straightforward than it seems. For example, getting rid of a card with very good Warsaw Pact defensive numbers – which seems straightforward, also gets rid of that card’s very lackluster Warsaw Pact performance on the ground, as well as a special event that is…pretty mild. On the other hand, getting rid of the card whose event will completely undo all your work whittling away at Soviet air defenses will also get rid of a card where those air defenses aren’t a threat for a given strike – and one where NATO gets a massive number of ground reinforcements. “Is this card good or bad?” very much depends on when in the game you are, what you’ve done, etc. which makes removing them a refreshing change from just “Find the worst card, get rid of it.”

Critical Thresholds

The OCA and DEAD tracks, which track enemy air-to-air and ground-to-air defenses respectively, serve as the source for two major thresholds that can change how the game runs substantially. The values on these tracks are subtracted from the air or ground defense value drawn from a card, and at certain levels (-3 for American F-15s, -5 for Canadian F-16s on the OCA track for example) there is no value on one of the cards that will beat that squadron’s stats, so you are guaranteed success. This wildly changes what you can do, spreading your fighters out thinner to escort more raids, being able to shift bombers from suppressing ground defenses to the primary objective of the raid, etc.

These thresholds have to be maintained (they creep back up at an average of one level every two turns), but once you cross them, all kinds of doors open up.

Overall Impressions

As a whole, NATO Air Commander is a fun, approachable solo game experience. I do have a couple places where I found myself wanting more. The first is the mission cards – they add an element of “Can I do this and also achieve what I want to achieve?”, but they also need to be treated as bonuses or things to mitigate as often as they actually need to be treated as objectives. More than anything in the game, they felt like a “If you’re winning, win harder” mechanic that — while primarily responsible for me being able to convert “The Warsaw Pact has stalled” to “The Warsaw Pact is routing” — was something I found myself by and large simply grumbling about, rather than doing. In fairness, I imagine “idiot generals asking for air support when they don’t need it” is a major component of actually being in charge of NATO air defense, so…maybe that’s not so bad.

The second was the special mission types that come from a successful reconnaissance – these occurred very rarely for me, and only really in the closing turns of the game. This wasn’t as much a bad mechanic as one that was superfluous for much of the game, just drawing a card, going “Nope!”, and moving on.

But aside from these relatively minor disappointments, it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple late nights making fighter plane noises to myself while a dog looked on in confusion, and I’ve found myself wanting to play it again.

It also feels like a game that’s got some legs to it – the scenarios are largely based on what planes you have, when reinforcements may arrive, and the relative strengths of Warsaw Pact and NATO ground troops – that’s not very many variables that have to be adjusted, and can produce some wildly different scenarios. If you are a fan of the “Cold War goes hot” genre, and consider solo wargames at least a sometimes treat, NATO Air Commander is definitely worth your consideration.

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